M. Sc. Thorben Kaak

Research: Real-time MIMO Signal Processing for active SONAR Systems

The development of SONAR (acronym: SOund Navigation And Ranging) systems startet in the early 20th century inspired by the calamity of the Titanic in 1912. A system should be developed to prevent collision with icebergs. Since that time systems for a broad variety of applications such as navigation, fish finding, cartography, etc. have been developed and SONAR systems are extensively used in civil as well as military shipping. Next to active systems where emitted soundwaves are used to sense the environment by reflections, passive systems are available which are solely listening for waves emitted by the environment. In many available systems "classical" techniques like time-delay beamforming and the emission of correlated waveforms using all available sender elements are utilized. Next to that the operator needs to intervene to adopt the emitted waveforms and the processing chain to the environment and the awaited target type to achieve an optimal detection rate.

Recently so called cognitive SONAR-systems and in addition to that MIMO techniques are proposed. Both ideas should be combined to build an innovative more powerful system. While cognitive systems are sensing the environment and utilizing previous detection data to autonomously optimize emitted waveforms and the processing of the raw data to the situation, MIMO-systems are emitting uncorrelated waveforms to achieve an improved illumination of the underwaterchannel and such virtual arrays with a higher number of elements. As the number of elements is related to the resolution of the system such systems are e.g. capable of an enhanced detection rate.

Related topics:

Beamforming

MIMO techniques

Sensor fusion

Array design

Signal design

Further interests:

Real-time digital signal processing

Detection & tracking

Channel / environment simulation

Short CV

2016 - current

Research assistant at the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany

Recent News

At the end of October (24.10.2018 till 27.10.2018) we spent again a few days on the island Sylt to reflect our past, current, and future research work. This included all Ph.D. topics but also the general direction of our research. Of course, also teaching and team related issues were discussed. Beside all that official work we also enjoyed the time on that beautiful island with several common ...